The Senses, VAK, NLP & Highscope!
The Senses
Use the senses as a check list to devise varied activities for your pupils, use as many of the senses as you can sensibly and safely.. Handling historical or old objects such as Greek coins from 500BC or your great granny’s handbag from 1923 can be a memorable experience for a child or adult, especially if a story is woven around it. Looking at, drawing and handling animals be they gerbils, mini-beasts under magnification or sea creatures in a clear plastic jar can be unforgettable. Put every day objects in a “feelie” bag or empty crisp box. Get the pupils to describe what they can feel. Can they put together puzzles by feel alone? Can you make use of music, noises, birdsong, or whale sounds? Can you find away to use smell and taste safely into your teaching? Ask pupils to draw, sketch, cut up, redraw taste and cook with unusual ingredients such as avocado, chilli, maize, peppers and chocolate used by the Aztecs to make tortillas, chilli dip, guacamole and chocolatl. Make one lesson each week a bit more sensual, how you might stimulate one particular sense? Watch to see which pupils respond dramatically.
V.A.K. (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic)
Visual: see,watch,observe,look.
Auditory: hear,listen,speak.
Kinaesthetic:touch,feel,do,act out.
Language used by the pupils or adults for that matter can give you clues to their preferences. Listen out for words associated with Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic.
“I see your point of view.” Visual: see, view, looks, reveals, perspective, focus, picture, (light/dark)
“I hear what you say and that sounds fine to me.” Auditory: hear, tell, say, ask, sounds, (loud/soft)
“That idea doesn’t fell right, it doesn’t grab me.” Kinaesthetic: move, hit, touch, feel, struggle. grab, go with that, struck by the idea,(rough/smooth)
NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming)
Why NLP? Neuro: The neurological processes of hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling are the basic building blocks of our experience. Linguistic: The ways in which we use language to represent our experience and communicate with others. Programming: The strategies which we use to organise these inner processes to produce results.
Neuro Linguistic Programming. Grinder and Bandler, in their search for excellence tried to find out what makes a professional an expert? Over many years you tend to develop intuitive awareness about peoples' needs. You watch and listen to every aspect of their persona. Faced with 36 pupils at the start of your teaching career this may seem a little crazy. If you can calm yourself and train yourself to be still, opening yourself up to pupils's dominant ways of taking in ideas, thinking about them and expressing themselves, then things will happen.
You will notice:-
Which pupils stare out of the window, love watching nature, are entranced by patterns and colour, doodle when you are talking to them and crave art. Try to encourage and develop their strengths.
Which pupils love to hear your stories, real, imagined or read. They can become authors, scriptwriters and actors themselves with your help.
Which pupils have to touch and fiddle with objects, toys, their hair, clothes and can't wait for P.E. or games. Can you make their learning as active as possible. Try to help them develop fine motor co-ordination.
Using the Highscope teaching model, (Plan, Do, Review) can you plan for V, A and K?
Plan The learners do the planning from a choice of activities. What will you need to get started? How will you approach the task? What is in it for the learner? Why bother?
Do Introduction: Set up interest then some Input to help engage with the material. Process: Work on, make sense of the material. Output: Respond to the material perhaps with a product.
Review Plenary, feedback, summarise, then plan the next input.,
If each phase has opportunities for V, A and K then you optimise the chances of all the learners engaging, working on and being able to respond to the task. Often it is unrealistic to plan for all three modes in all three phases of the lesson (See Differentiation by resources and Differentiation by response). Will they be allowed to respond in different ways or must it always be written or spoken? Could it be a drawing, diagram, role-play or mime. {See Gardner}
Realise how important:
Demonstrating and modelling are to those who like to watch.
Reading, explaining and discussing are for those who like to hear or listen.
How frustrated the others will be waiting to get their hands on the material.
Use a variety of resources to act as a stimulus, not just the one’s which might stimulate you. Vary your own input, sometimes say nothing, just demonstrate, ask for explanation, at other times get the "doers" to show the rest of the class. This feels natural in PE, dance, drama and art so why not other subjects. Make the VAK model open in your planning and teaching, tell them what you are doing and why. Ask for feedback, advice and suggestions for activities the pupils best liked doing. An old fashioned nature walk, with time for just listening, looking, touching and smelling. Take time to feel the wind, the sun on your face or listen to the distant sounds of dogs barking, lorries, aeroplanes overhead. Then, either on the spot or back in the class examine, look at under magnification, classify, discuss and display what they have found. Talk about, draw, write or record ion some way what you/they remember sensing. We have come to expect instant satisfaction, but it is short lived, transient and rarely useful.
What might be gained from starting a small garden, planting seeds, growing seedlings, small fruit trees and bushes, trying to re-connect to the earth. Propagate plants from cuttings indoors. Give away seeds, seedlings, cuttings, especially if the pupils end up with a beautiful plant they can further propagate or even better something to eat.
Can you experiment with food preparation? Make simple but interesting dishes. Find food for free in the countryside.
Practical Action’s “The Sustainability Handbook for D&T teachers” 2008 is packed with design projects based around the SIX Rs of Re-think, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Re-cycle
Do your students know you as a learner or only as a know-er, teacher?
We all copy the habits and values that surround us. The human brain is designed for survival and imitation of those still standing is a good plan. We transmit as much of our values and learning habits by how we talk, act and behave around our pupils as by direct teaching. Intellect is modifiable, dynamic and evolving. We can compensate and learn to overcome deficiencies. As adults we need to learn “to mediate as little as possible but as much as necessary”. (R. Feuerstein)
We construct our own internal model of the world, based on our perceptions. For us it is the real world, the world as we know it. Many human problems derive from the problems in our heads rather than from the world as it really is. By developing meta-knowledge about our own inner models, we can change our habits, thoughts and feelings from unhelpful into helpful.
h. liebling July 2008